Jaspers and Ricoeur on the Self and The Other

Abstract

The relationship between Karl Jaspers and Paul Ricoeur is remarkable both for the intensity of its early days and for its apparent coolness soon there after. The typical understanding of this separation focuses on Ricoeur's critique of Jasper's understanding of religious commitment. As the story goes, Ricoeur dismisses Jaspers' faith as a form of Don Juanism; while Jaspers' and his followers see in Ricoeur's turn to the symbolics and hermeneutics of religion a move away from the rigors of a philosophical faith in the power of antinomial reason (Vernunft),1 I shall argue, however, that Ricoeur's break with Jaspers is not best understood as a move to the narrower and more manageable confines of religious immanence in the face of the abyss of transcendence but rather as a detour into particular testimony made necessary by a philosophical account of the self that is inspired in many ways by Jaspers insofar as it is focused on attestation and testimony. More importantly, this detour into religious exegesis by Ricoar, rather than being an abandonment of philosophical investigation, has stimulated important recent developments in his thought; the most significant of these are developed in Oneself as Another and La memoire, l'histoire, l'oubli.2 In these works, Ricoeur has made clear, what is already apparent in his earlier works, the connection between self, attestation, conscience, the other, and the Absolute Other. In this essay, I shall examine these central notions in order to begin a more constructive account of the relationship between Ricoeur and Jaspers. The Centrality of the Elucidation of the Self for Ricoeur and Jaspers For both Ricoeur and Jaspers, any attempt at re-examining or re-invigorating metaphysics in this age must pass through a critical investigation of the self. For Jaspers, the systematic organizing of worldviews becomes the soaring analysis of transcendence and ciphers only through the elucidation of the self as Existenz. Thus the ultimate question of his three-volume Philosophy concerns what sort of a cipher of foundering is still possible today? How can it be, beyond all exegesis, if what foundering shows us is not the void, after all-if it is transcendent being?3 The answer to these questions, however, is determined by his account of Existenz: Possible Existenz today can no longer solidify the ciphers, and yet they need not be nothing. And no matter what they are, they will be ambiguous once they become objective, and in order to be true they must withstand the final cipher, that of foundering. They must hold up under a ruthlessly positivistic view of the facts of foundering, and under an existentially serious approach to it in boundary situations.4 We can find similar convictions in Ricoeur's Oneself as Another. Neither selfhood nor otherness, in the sense in which we take these terms, can simply be reformulated in the frozen language of an ontology, ready for repetition, in the flattest sense of repetition. The other than self will never be a strict equivalent of Platonic Otherness, and our selfhood will never repeat Platonic Sameness. The ontology we present here is faithful to the suggestion made in our Introduction, namely that an ontology remains possible today inasmuch as the philosophies of the past remain open to reinterpretation and re-appropriations, thanks to a meaning potential left unexploited, even repressed, by the very systematization and of school formation to which we owe the great doctrinal corpora.5 Thus, what may be said about transcendence, God, the Absolute Other, etc. in philosophy today, according to both Ricoeur and Jaspers, is grounded in an account of the self. In what follows, I shall argue first that Ricoeur and Jaspers agree that the self has a fundamental desire to know itself as whole and to be faithful to such integrity (what Ricoeur sometimes calls the gnoseological dimension or simply, self-esteem); but that, second, Riconr-even in his earliest writings6-includes the relationship to an other than self in the very constitution of the self as it is manifest in the centrality of attestation; and finally, third, that the role of attestation not only gives a different shape to Ricoar's account of the other (even the Absolute Other) but enables him to avoid certain fundamental difficulties that he sees in Jaspers' account of transcendence and the Absolute Other. …